But we are digging up much that was laid down, and disgorging it back onto the earth's crust and into the atmosphere. We are felling the planet's lungs, the ancient forests. We are causing mass extinctions and reducing biodiversity. We are unsettling the evolved balance of life by creating novel chemicals, gases, bacteria, viruses, plants and animals that have never been part of nature's evolutionary processes, and allowing them to spread over the earth's surface. We are causing global warming on a scale not seen since the end of the Permian period when carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes started a chain of events that destroyed nearly all life. Earth is running backwards into the sterile toxic chaos from which it evolved.
Over 1,600 scientists, including four-fifths of all Nobel science prizewinners, issued the famous World Scientists' Warning to Humanity in 1992. It included these comments: "We are fast approaching many of the Earth's limits. Current economic practices that damage the environment cannot continue. Our massive tampering could trigger unpredictable collapse of critical biological systems that are only partly understood. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated." In the ensuing decade we have not changed course. Already a third of the planet's Ӯatural wealth' has been lost. Human misery on an unprecedented scale may result from the headlong rush of the wealthy for global exploitation. We may be guilty of the ultimate crime against humanity - allowing the earth's support systems to crumble while we enjoy the temporary benefits of an unsustainable lifestyle.
